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Born Slippy

The Telegraph printed a story at the end of September which did not get picked up by other media and their political coverage was overwhelmed by the party conferences. The article “Lib Dems tutored MPs on how to exploit their expenses” set out how Liberal Democrat MPs were given guidance on how to use the office expenses system to subsidise their political activities (link below).

The expenses revelations in the Telegraph has shown that there was a culture of claims where some MPs considered the various loopholes in the system they had established as an extension to their salaries. The focus has been on how individual MPs have exploited this system to its full. The stories of tennis courts, duck islands (well one), flipping homes, expensive items of furniture etc, captivated and disgusted the public but the same level of attention has not been paid to the way in which office expenses have been utilised.

The Telegraph story shows something, which many could see than worse than individuals feathering their own nests, is a conspiracy to twist and bend the rules for party advantage. Taking taxpayers money and using it to produce party political literature. My understanding is that the story in the Telegraph is only the first of a series of mechanisms used by the Liberal Democrats collectively to pervert the system.

The main example illustrated by the Telegraph from the Liberal Democratic Party guide is for the MP to use office expenses to buy adverts in political leaflets which cover the cost of the leaflets. The rules are not technically broken because the MPs’ adverts have no party political content in them. According to the Telegraph even the party leader Nick Clegg has done this.

Parliamentary Office of the Liberal Democrats (POLD)

A cursory review of Lib Dem MP expenses shows that almost all of them pay several thousand pounds per year into this political organisation. Of course Labour and Conservative have such offices which are paid for from subscription fees paid for MPs out of their own pockets. The Lib Dem MPs pay for it from their office allowances claiming it covers conferences, briefings and staff training. The House of Commons provides the latter two free of charge and there is no case for paying parliamentary staff to attend their own party’s conference. The Bristol Lib Dem MP diverts over £4,000 per year to POLD.

Print Societies

The Liberal Democrats have also found a way of getting around the reporting requirements to the Electoral Commission. It appears that print societies have sprung up around the country, run by Lib Dems they tend not to be limited companies and therefore do not have to provide published accounts to companies’ house and because they are not political parties they don’t have to make returns to the Electoral Commission. This allows the lib Dems to move large chunks of their political activity off their balance sheet.

In Bristol The print society is called Kingprint. In the case of Bristol West not only does it print the MP’s direct mails to constituents and target letters to constituents it also rents him part of its offices in Bristol which he shares with Kingprint. Kingprint also produces the majority of constituency and local election voter material. The constituency accounts on the Electoral Commission website mentioning Kingprint but not producing details of its accounts includes local councillors Jon Rogers, Neil Harrison, Alex Woodman and Fiona Hance. Neil Harrison has also been named as a trustee of Kingprint by the local MP in response to media inquiries although neither Neil or any other councillors have registered an interest in Kingprint (They are keen to name every charity and community organisation they are involved in). Neil’s is set out below.

Sanctimony

The Liberal Democrats in Bristol have made a point of using their leaflets to say how disgusted they are with the abuse of MPs’ expenses:

Stephen Williams MP report “Stephen Williams has been an outspoken advocate of openness in MP’s expenses” and “Stephen Williams is a fine role model for other MPs”.

Why then is he renting his offices from a ‘secret’ society which publishes no accounts, why too does he print many of his publications with the same organisation? If he really is serious about this he will open the books of Kingprint and publish them in full on his website.

Local councillors have also shown their individual disgust with personal statements in their local election leaflets (hat tip to The Bristol Blogger):

Jon Rogers (Ashley – Lib Dem)“Like many people I have spoken to, I am shocked and angered by the way some MPs have clearly abused the expenses system. I am pleased that our local MP Stephen Williams is not one of those MPs”

Mark Wright (Cabot – Lib Dem and PPC Bristol South)“Like many people I have spoken to, I am shocked and angered by the way MPs have clearly abused the system. I am pleased that our local MP Stephen Williams is not one of those MPs”

Steve Comer (Eastville – Lib Dem)“Like many people I have spoken to, I am shocked and angered by the way MPs have clearly abused the system. I am pleased that our local MP Stephen Williams is not one of those MPs”

And there are plenty more like this across the city.

So why are these councillors not opening up the books of the organisation that prints all their leaflets, what is it they are hiding?

And so…

The truth may be the Liberal Democrats have a national strategy, revealed by the Telegraph to use our money to pay for their party political activities while also claiming to be the party most in favour of openness and reform. Their Bristol MP is following a national pattern of diverting money to both the national party through payments to POLD and to the local party through payments (totaling over £10k per year) to a print society which is owned by local party members. This is not the individual actions of greedy MPs this is a national conspiracy to divert public funds into party political propaganda and organisation.

Nice smearage here Paul, you must be very proud of yourself for making such a web of half-truths sound so fair and reasonable. Neatly timed to coincide with more expenses scandal about the Labour party too – always good to distract from issues at home, eh. I particularly like how you so reasonably say that attempting to use comms allowance (brought in by your own party to help your own MPs) for party political literature “could be seen be many as worse than individuals feathering their own nests” – i.e. that it would be worse than defrauding the taxpayer of thousands of taxpayers money for personal gain. In other words, since Stephen Williams was clean on expenses, you need to create an air of doubt over the comms allowance and then pretend that such implied misuses would be worse than the wholesale fraud perpetrated by so many Labour and Tory MPs. Neat. Is this from Karl Rove’s book?

Anyway, the practice of using any comms allowance to take out adverts in party literature is reprehensible and you know full well that no Lib Dem in Bristol has done that. (In fact, hardly anyone has ever done that, but let’s not that that fact get in the way of your good story, or of the original one at your new friends at the impartial Telegraph).

As for Kingprint, the idea that it exists to shift “large chunks of their political activity off their balance sheet” is laughable. This “secret society” (hee-hee!) exists to print riso-ed A3 and A4 leaflets for ward focuses and existed long before Stephen Williams was elected. It has never printed an MP’s Parliamentary report (shall I call that a lie on your part, or be generous and call it an inaccuracy?), nor does it produce much constituency material since those are usually glossy or tabloid print. It’s good at printing letters though, and also does a very nice job of printing ward leaflets like my own “Cabot News”. Long may it continue doing so. It’s ironic that because the Lib Dems can’t afford to order big-business printing like the Labour Party and do it instead with a volunteer-based print-society, you should try to twist that into something sinister. I thought with your background in the FRN you would be appreciative of such volunteer business, but perhaps not where it involves your opponents.

To conclude, you say “The truth may be” – i.e. you know full well that the truth isnt so. While I hope this post isnt a signal of what we can expect over the next 9 months, I expect it is. Perhaps you’ve watching the way Fox News and the way people like Glenn Beck operate to generate plausible smear stories – it certainly looks like it. It’ll take more than that to win in Bristol West. I suggest you might get better results by knocking on people’s doors and telling your government to deliver what those people are asking for…

“Kingprint is a voluntary printing society run by members of the local party”

Which members?
Why have no lib dem councillors or the MP declared any interest in Kingprint?
Why isn’t Kingprint registered with the Electoral Commission or Companies House, so that it would have to publish annual accounts?
Why is it called ‘Kingprint’ a name that distances it from lib dems when it is clearly a lib dem owned and run organisation?
Why is it the landlord of the MP?
Why is it almost impossible to find out any information about it?

I admit one error, The annual reports are not printed there but direct mails from the MP are – even though the colour part has to be printed elsewhere.

These sorts of abuses are very common throughout the Lib Dem franchise and not in evidence AFAIK in the modern era in any other party. Most of the LD MPs seem to have complex tenancies involving shares and intermediaries, most of them make a round figure payment to LD offices as well as paying for specific services, there are lots of print societies, and there are lots of tithes of councillors etc that are not reported to EC or in audited accounts.

Presumably, if it is true that Mr Williams and other LDs e.g. MEPs in the region have not placed paid for adverts this means that Bristol Lib Dems think this practice – with Clegg and Huhne among known adherents – is disgraceful or illegal or something?

Do the Bristol Council Lib Dem group pay a tithe? On what basis? And has this been declared as donations to EC or documented in audited accounts?

LD Printing Societies appear to operate as a recipient of donations – which ought to be accountable – as well as volunteer time which is not an election expense but which some argue ought to be quantified in not-for-profit audited accounts. Printing Societies seem a bit shifty to these eyes. Less than a handful get a mention in EC returns AFAICS.

There is no earthly reason for them not to be CLGs or indeed trading companies or to produce and publish accounts. LD commitment to openness is risible.

Laundering money in party coffers is arguably worse than buying an extra TV or whatever as it is a kind of deferred gratification. Trying to win another five years of troughing.

Sorry to spoil your fun Paul, but I’m not involved in the running of Kingprint and haven’t been since 2006 – ie. before I became a councillor. No current councillors are trustees of Kingprint, to the best of my knowledge. I don’t have the time or energy to correct your countless other errors and fantasies.

Oh lord… enter Chris Paul, the Labour Party’s own Guido Fawkes and barrel-scraper extraordinaire. The man with a pathological hatred of all Lib Demmery since his own Labour MP got beat in Manchester. What have we done to deserve his presence? Oh yeh, we beat a Labour MP! Fair cop.

Actually it all becomes clear now. The alarms should have rung when I noticed that Paul Smith’s 2nd blog post was titled “Labour of Love”, which just happens to be the title of Chris Paul’s gossip blog. So it doesnt surprise me that this blog post is just a recycling of Chris Paul’s vitriolic post on the same subject last week: “Time Lib Dem Shenanigans Were Publicised”. I guess Paul S is a fan of C Paul. Come to think of it I do remember C Paul producing some absurd stories about Bristol Lib Dems “cutting train services” and “doubling their allowances”, so I guess the transfer is both directions. Still, at least now we know where Paul S looks for inspiration – and what to expect in the coming months.

But anyway, I see you now want the Lib Dems to produce a list of denials and clarifications, etc. This is textbook stuff. It might have been hoped that when Labour learnt from the US presidential election they would have learnt from Obama. But instead it seems they learnt from the Republican machine. Retrospectively it was perhaps silly to expect the party that gave us Damien McBride would do otherwise.

So, the theory behind this tactic is that is results in the Lib Dems producing lists of denials and rebuttals. It goes something like this:
1. Oi, sinister Lib Dems, why arent you clarifying… {collection of questions that sound quite reasonable but actually contain implicit wrongdoing} ?
2. And why arent you denying… {other collection of things that include smears and unfounded allegations} ?

The idea being of course that now you have a furious argument with local Lib Dems suddenly denying things all over the place, and “there’s no smoke without fire”. Passers-by raise their eyebrows. “What’s up there?” they say. “Lots of denial about something.” “Ah, Lib Dems got something to hide, I reckon.” And so it enters the public consciousness. Clever.

Glenn Beck on Fox News is the high priest of the tactic, although the tables got turned on him recently when a group of liberal bloggers set up a spoof investigative site demanding that Glenn Beck deny that he raped and killed a girl in 1990. Amazingly, Beck still hasn’t denied these serious allegations. Why not? What’s he got to hide? All he needs to do is say “No, I didnt do it”. Sounds pretty suspicious to me. I think he’s got something to hide…

All those denials, and nothing about the thousands of pounds the LibDem MPs pay to the Parliamentary Office of the LibDems (POLD) – oh, I mean that the tax-payer pays to POLD as the MPs claim it from their expenses. And before anyone says “They’ve all the same”, they are not. Labour MPs pay a levy from their own pockets for the same sort of services from the Parliamentary Labour Party.
If something is party political it should not be funded by the tax-payer, at least not until we get state funding of political parties.

Deal with the substance or everyone will simply assume that it is bang on that:

(a) Lib Dem MPs were coached in gaming the expenses regimes, in a written document, part authored by LD Head of Campaigns, and leaked to the Daily Telegraph, which explains the patterns of claims across the nation;
(b) that unaccountable printing societies are rife;
(c) that payments to Lib Dem party offices (region or POLD) from tax payer funds are endemic and poorly explained;
(d) that rents/leases/tenancies are gamed to hell by LDs;
(e) that Council Group tithes are (?illegally) hidden from Electoral Commission and that local unit accounts that should be produced are not produced, hiding the huge war chests;
(f) that political staff are paid from tax payers’ money;
(g) that non-political adverts are taken in political print at grossly inflated prices and with no good cause, subsiding the print (and I really don’t care whether SW has done it personally, plenty of SW LDs have done so);
(h) that there are silly allotments of printing machinery and other costs including an MP of my ken paying rent with tax money on a riso part paid for by tax money and doing 90% non Westminster business;
(i) and so on and so forth, PR Paul Rowen MP’s two £9.95 TV services in his hotel room being just the sort of thing that the prurient papers love so much.

Deal with the substantive issues Mark. My blog coverage of this, far from being a smear, is a presentation of facts and figures. Any reasonable explanation for which is yet to be seen.

On top of the local issues the revelation that Lib Dems are not “clean” on allowances will hit home.

Local issues like dear SW’s complete tossery on Top Up Fees, like Paul Rowen’s U-turns on asbestos and really truly horrible smear campaigns (top man Dave Hennigan) and in Man Wit of course we have John Leech MP who is yet to apologise for disgraceful “mistakes” over the possible he said closure of a much loved cancer hospital.

If you lot DON’t explain and persist with facile head emptying and insults then it is only a matter of time before this cross over into mainstream media.

For the record: Keith Bradley was not my MP and I was a ward sub-agent for Tony Lloyd MP in my home constituency. Next door in Man Cent. I blogged about it for SNWDWVF.

Sadly boundary changes mean I will be in Man Wit after the next election and. excuse me for caring, I’d much rather have Lucy Powell, Labour’s prospective MP than John Leech for my MP come the dawn.

PS I understand John Leech MP had a furious if tired and emotional exchange with one scribbler during the Lib Dem conference. Make no mistake Mark there are people out there in the mainstream media who are getting interested.

Why shouldn’t LibDems rent office space from the local party if the local party owns an office? Would you rather the office space was rented commerically and cost the taxpayer more? This chat about ‘taxpayers money funding campaigns’ is misleading at best as the same campaign funding controls remain in place; the local party is using an asset they won to raise funds. As to the federal party ‘schooling’ LibDems on how to do it… obviously the federal party advises local parties on how to run branches for maximum effectiveness.

If you were feeling honest you might want to discuss the relationship between Labour and Unite. New Labour paid Unite £millions of taxpayers money ostensible to fund ‘training programmes’ and the link the better to effectively perform their function as a trades union. Unite then paid the Labour party £millions during the elction campaign which went right into the Labour party’s warchest with much of it being manipulated in a way to deliberate circumvent the campaign spending rules. If the union is so skint it needs taxpayer’s money which does it stop bankrolling the Labour party? Then maybe they’d learn to live within their means like the rest of us have.

LibDems renting offices to each other or the Labour party effectively paying those currently organising the BA strike millions in taxpayer money to donate right back to the Labour party; I think I know which I’m more aggrieved about.